Shoot Film Co.

For many photographers with commercial aspirations, one of the names that will invariably come up as a source of inspiration is Dave Hill.

Earlier on in his career, he was known for creating complex, high-concept composite images with digital photography and Photoshop, with which he became synonymous.

His personal work harkens back to something much simpler--most of the personal images he shares on his site and social channels seem to be shot with his Leica M6.

More recently, we have gone behind the scenes with Dave on big commercial jobs he shot on film, such as for Honda and Jeep (watch those Behind the scenes videos--seriously, we'll wait), and quiet lifestyle images using only natural light.

He's obviously been very busy shooting commercial jobs--and that he has been able to convince art buyers at such high levels to approve campaigns to be shot with film is nothing short of amazing today.

But late last year, he quietly launched a book of his personal medium format film work chronicling his travels through the city of Barstow, CA. It is a quiet book full of revealing images and moments of peoples' lives in a small town. Dave took a few minutes to tell us about the book.

Tell us about yourself and your commercial work

My name’s Dave Hill. I’m from Carlsbad, CA and now live in Los Angeles with my wife and 15month old daughter.  I got my start in photography in high school in the 90’s, shooting my friends skating and snowboarding.  I went to UCLA for History and they had an amazing daily newspaper.  I joined freshman year as an intern.  We had to roll, process, and scan all of our own film, mostly TRI-X 400.  The UCLA newspaper is were I really learned how to approach people without fear.  It was a wild time. I became the Photo Editor my senior year in 2000.  I got to spend our entire photo equipment budget that year on the new Nikon D1, so I had a very early start in digital.

That led me to spend the next 4 years after college really getting into Photoshop and compositing and creating worlds.  I was also in a punk band at the time and started shooting a ton of music groups.  No one was really compositing in the music scene yet, so I started to get meetings and attention from bigger artists and labels.  From there, it led to a bunch of rappers and lots of CD packages, and then eventually, into the advertising world.

The entire time, though, I was regretting my obsession with Photoshop and really yearning to get back out and just shoot film with natural light.  My longest break in shooting film was from 2003-2005.  After those couple years of gaining weight and living in Photoshop, I bought my first Leica M6 and 35mm f2 lens on Craigslist.  That was my first film cam purchase since my Nikon N70 is 1998!

So it’s taken me about 10 years from when I got that Leica, to now being finally hired for some natural light commercial jobs.  It was really, REALLY tough to break out of the compositing world.  At some point, I just had to accept loosing the bigger budgets and retouching fees and just go for it.  The past few years I’ve really been trying to push film and at least non-composite lifestyle images to all my clients.  It’s been a tough trying to impress anyone these days.

The bonus from my lack of Photoshop time has been more exploration back into street photography. I used to love shooting street and journalism stuff in college and the past 1-2 years, I’ve been taking random weekends off, documenting areas that fascinate me.

Your book "Barstow" is quite a departure from you commercial work. What is the motivation for it?

I love the desert.  I always have.  My dad used to take us camping to Anza-Borrego in East San Diego camping.  We’d go dirt biking, shoot guns, bond with my brothers.  It was awesome.  We’d pass lots of random towns, including Barstow, from time to time.  

As an adult, I’ve passed through Barstow on the way to Vegas like everyone else, but always had a fascination with it.  My wife is awesome and a few times, we were bored in LA and decided to drive to Barstow, watch a movie at the little ghetto theater in town, and stay at the Ramada. It’s an experience.  After doing that a couple times, I really wanted to explore the down more.

My wife had a baby shower weekend and I knew that was my chance.  I packed up my iPhone and just my Mamiya 7 and 80mm lens and headed to Barstow.  I spent the next two days walking around the city, getting yelled at and getting called a pervert.  I found Barstow to be a really rough town.  People didn’t respond well to me walking through their neighborhoods.  I’m still fascinated why people would live in a desert town like Barstow.

Shed some light on the creation of the book

My edit was really focused on people.  Sure, there were some cool/depressing old buildings out there, but I wanted to include as much of the people as possible.  It was hard to toss out some of the landscapes, but I felt like my strength was how I approached the people.

I had it printed at A&I here in North Hollywood.  I did a test of the bigger on-demand printers and A&I’s paper really kicked everyone else’s butt.  They are a little pricey, but I felt it was worth it. I only did an initial run of 50 copies and still have a few left for sale.  I feel like I’d have to sell 200-500 copies to actually make any money.  With a run of 50, I actually lost money when selling the book for $30, but I did it more for art’s sake, and really wanted people to have the book in their hands, whatever it took.  In the future, it might be nice to go big, print more, and make a profit!

Why did you choose to shoot this project using film?

Film was a no-brainer for me. Film looks better than digital, hands-down.  The colors are unbeatable, no matter your Photoshop skill level.  I shoot all my street and personal stuff on film.  With projects like this Barstow book, I shoot so slow anyway, it’s not like I’m blowing through a ton of rolls. Call me silly, but I feel like when I shoot a photo on a negative, I’ve really created something. With digital, it feels like a robot just collecting data.

Do you plan to use film for any commercial work in the future, if you haven't already done so? (Editor's Note: I asked this question before his amazing Honda and Jeep behind-the-scenes videos came out!)

Yes!  I’ve been spending extra money to have a camera-man come along on recent commercial car jobs, capturing the experience of shooting film.  These videos have been getting a little attention in the photo world online, but my primary goal was to be able to show art buyers, who are always a little skeptical, that film on a commercial job isn’t stressful, but can be just a simple part of the workflow. Film doesn’t need to mean HOLGA/blurry/artsy/grainy/window-light nudes. Film can mean commercial shots in high-res,  with beautiful colors and skin tones.

A huge thanks to Dave Hill for talking to us and helping to keep film alive and a viable option in the commercial world! Please check out Dave's website and Social profiles below, and make sure to pick up a copy of "Barstow" while you still can.

www.davehillphoto.com
instagram.com/davehillphoto
davehillphoto.tumblr.com

Link to Barstow Book - now only $15! :-)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0990786706

Great article about the survival and resurgence of film photography, with interviews with folks from Kodak, Ilford, and some amazing photographers like Todd Hido. One of the many interesting points: Fujifilm Instax sales have doubled every year for the past three years. Here's a link to the full story.

Special Preorder Pricing NOW. Ships September 8th 2015.

I'm proud to present the newest patches: The All Hallows Eve Special Edition. Two new patches, illustrated by Andrew Denholm. https://youtu.be/B2m0ovlFDJc I've been waiting a long time to announce these, and now that it's September, and the Halloween season is upon us, they must be revealed to the world. I started working on the ideas of these months ago, and when I saw Andrew Denholm's inspiring work, I knew he was the one I wanted to illustrate them. We worked together and the final result are the two newest patches in the lineup, which I am proud to announce to the world today.

The vital stats:

• 3-inch circle
• Custom embroidered
• Heat seal backing
• Made in U.S.A.
• Glows in the dark

Order yours today! Special preorder pricing until September 8th, 2015.

To help celebrate today's announcement, we've asked Andrew himself to talk about his work:

1) Please tell us about yourself and how you came to be an illustrator. As a child i was encouraged to draw at home by my parents and would spend hours either copying cartoons or making my own characters. This developed into making sketch books full of drawings as a teenager with my style constantly shifting and changing depending on what i was interested in at the time. I began to paint a lot in high school and was accepted into Edinburgh College of Art to study for four years. I initially wanted to do fine art painting but i discovered that illustration was my true passion as i loved to tell stories through images. I had not even considered illustration to be a possible career growing up by looking back i realise i had been training all my life for it.

  2) Who are some artists, in any medium and artform, that you take inspiration from in your work? I have had many influences throughout my life that have helped shape the way i create my work. I particularly enjoy the work of Keith Haring as his graphic style is really exciting and full of energy. I really enjoy images with lots of movement and emotion like Guernica by Picasso and his work is so varied it is a constant source of inspiration. Artists like Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat are great artists to study for character design. I also like many Scottish artist such as Peter Howson and John Bellany.

3) Was it fun to work on the Halloween-themed film patches? The patches were great fun to develop. Both of the characters had lots of mood and darkness to them but i was also able to be playful, adding a sense of fun to them. Trying to incorporate cameras into the patches were a challenge as the composition was a little tricky but i feel they work really well.  Halloween is such a great area for character design so it was enjoyable to research the subject before designing the patches.

4) What new projects are you working on now? I am currently developing a storytelling kit for children that will encourage them to write and illustrate their own stories. It has a basic structure that will guide children through the different elements of a story while allowing them to tell it in their own way. I hope to help children enjoy drawing as much as i did when i was their age. I have studied the theory of Vladimir Propp and how fairy stories are structured to help develop the project which has been very interesting. Check out Andrew's work and follow him:

Two high end 35mm point and shoot film cameras go head to head in this video review! The rundown: The legendary and highly sought-after Yashica T4 Super, an all-plastic wonder with a razor sharp lens vs the less-popular but comparably-priced Rollei AFM35, an all-metal rebrand of the original Fujifilm Klasse. Which one do I choose to keep? Check out the video below.

The short story: high quality 35mm point and shoot camera with a sharp lens and Rollei's HFT lens coating.

The long story: A small point and shoot released in the 90s that, at the time, competed with the likes of the Contax T2. It weights about 9 ounces, it has a more curved grip than the Contax T2. This camera is actually designed by Fujifilm, and is absolutely structurally identical to the original Fujifilm Klasse (not the Klasse S or Klasse W). It is, in essence, a rebranded Fuji camera. The one difference: it uses Rollei's HFT coating on the lens, instead of Fujifilm's EBC coating. Rollei's HFT coating is said to be the same as Zeiss' highly regarded T* coating.

The lens is a 38mm focal length slightly wider than "normal," but not that wide. Max aperture is f/2.6, slightly faster than most of the fastest point and shoots with models like the Olympus MJU II/Stylus Epic and the Contax T2 being f/2.8. Minimum focus distance is 15.7 inches. Shooting modes are Program Auto (the camera chooses both the aperture and shutter values--full auto, basically) or Aperture Priority, where you choose the Aperture and the camera chooses the shutter speed. Reads DX code from 35mm film cassettes and sets ISO accordingly, from anywhere between ISO 50 and 3200.

There is no way to manually override the film speed like you can on the newer Klasse S and Klasse W, so if you want to do push/pull processing or want to shoot at lower-rated ISOs with your stock of expired film, you're out of luck. It  has a built-in flash with a guide number of 11. Meter is very accurate, as are most point and shoots from the 90s. Flash has a red-eye reduction mode. Highest shutter speed is 1/1000th of a second. It DOES NOT have an exposure compensation function; instead, it has a +/- half-stop or full-stop bracketing feature, where the camera takes three pictures total: 1 picture at the proper exposure, one picture below, and one picture above.

I was originally put off by this because I like using exposure compensation. I realized with color negative, there is so much latitude that it doesn't matter much to me in practical use. I've never used (and probably never will use) the bracketing feature. It uses a CR2 battery. For my point and shoot of choice (for now at least), I chose this over a Contax T2. I owned both for several months, and I wanted to go with the highly loved and appreciated T2, especially because it has exposure compensation. I had a LOT of trouble focusing the T2. About 1 in 5 pictures were mis-focused or back-focused. I thought something was wrong with my camera so I bought another--same problem. I talked to a couple friends that had T2s and I asked them if they had issues--they both replied with a resounding "YES," that they had issues with a lot of pictures being out of focus, and they both independently remarked that they felt like maybe was something wrong with their cameras, or that maybe people just didn't want to talk trash about the T2 because it's such a well-loved camera.

Don't let this turn you off getting a Contax T2 if that's what you want--by all means, try one, because you might love it. Take everything I say with a grain of salt because sometimes I don't know what I'm doing (that was for you Contax lovers; I said it for you so you don't have to!). By the way, I really loved the T2. Very much. I just didn't like the out-of-focus pictures I sometimes got. But I digress. I ended up selling this Rollei in favor of the T2, and frustration with the T2 made me sell that camera and I ended up getting the Rollei again. I decided I could live without exposure compensation. My one nitpick outside of the lack of exposure compensation: the lens assembly moves into place and locks focus on the half-press after a split-second delay, as opposed to other point and shoots like the MJU II/Stylus Epic where the lens does its focus move after a full press (inevitably causing shutter lag). However, after locking focus on the half-press, there is absolutely NO delay from between when you do the full-press to when the shutter opens. You could call it a quirk or an advantage (or both), but after getting used to it, it is nice to be able to have essentially no shutter lag as long as your focus is already locked.

Overall and fun camera to use. It's very sturdy and definitely nice looking. The silver color might be too bright for some people, but you can get the original Fujifilm Klasse in silver OR black. This is not a camera you hear a whole lot about, but it fits right in there in the lexicon of high end film point and shoots. The newer Klasse models have more features and custom functions, but naturally command a much higher price. Thanks for reading! Please visit the shop to help support this site.